Windows azure

Windows azure is an operating system in the cloud. It is design for utility computing. It provides same features that a desktop computer provides but on a set of connected server storing data on servers in Microsoft data centers. Windows azure runs your application in scale, reliable, available and fault tolerance manner. Microsoft has awesome data center so no need to worry about the following as it will be handled by windows azure.

Also managing the above listed thing will be quite expensive. Windows azure lets you focus on application logic.In windows azure you have many virtual instances of window running your application known as "Fabric Controller".Fabric controller detects failure on an application and automatically starts the new instance of an application. It allows applications to run under zero down time.When we deploy azure application in the cloud azure the fabric controller automatically manages all the instances of application that are running. Application Fabric automatically provisions web or worker role to the application instances. All configurations that are required to run application in cloud azure are handling by Fabric Controller.

Windows azure has storage which stores data in the cloud. It has the following services which are independently accessible and scalable. The azure storage is managed by Microsoft so you can rely on Microsoft for fault tolerance and high availability.

. Blobs - provide a simple interface for storing large files along with metadata for the file. Windows Azure Blob allows us to store large objects, up to 50GB each in the cloud. . Tables - provide structured storage for maintaining service state. A table is a set of entities, which contain a set of properties. It supports massively scalable tables in the cloud, which can contain billions of entities and terabytes of data. The system will efficiently scale out by automatically scaling to thousands of servers as traffic grows. . Queues - provide reliable way for service communication. Windows Azure Queue provides a reliable message delivery mechanism. It provides a simple and asynchronous work dispatch mechanism, which can be used to connect different components of a cloud application. The Windows Azure Queues are highly available, durable and performance efficient.